


Reflections

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Think Memento, canon-compliant up till S8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 00:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3548543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Doctor, why do you hate yourself so much?"</p>
<p>Sometimes we learn to walk away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflections

**17.**

_He opens the doors and sees London, the cars on the street and the whistling city air and the grey clouds in a blue sky catching somewhere inside his chest with warring beats of loss and home. He smiles, gentle, and steps onto the pavement._

_“You could stay,” says the Doctor, casually, loosely. The Doctor’s feet do not leave the TARDIS; the Doctor’s smile does not reach the eyes. They both know a foregone conclusion when they see one._

_“I couldn’t,” he says, wry and wistful. The blue of the doorframe thrums under the pad of his thumb._

_The Doctor shrugs, slim shoulders rustling red silk and black shoulder pads set too wide. There is a weight and a warmth to the silence that hangs between them, a question and an answer neither of them will speak. He will not stay; the Doctor will not beg. Both of them understand, somewhere deep and dark and hidden, both of them understand why._

_“You made me better,” says the Doctor, eventually, with a smile that cracks around the edges. “Thank you for making me better.”_

_John takes a step back, takes a step away. He sticks his hands in his pockets._

_“Thank you,” he says, “for exactly the same.”_

***

_1._

She trips over her own feet as she runs.

It’s really very irksome, she thinks, trying to pull herself free of the wires caught around her ankles. She’s never been particularly coordinated, true, and she does have short legs that are terrible for running with, but she jogs. She spends time at the gym. She’s a grown woman with an agile mind and a sharp tongue and she really would like to believe that she’s nimble or light on her feet or something other than the sort of person who would end up sprawled on the ground in the most undignified of manners right in front of an advancing Chlori-something-or-other that’s about to kill her.

She can hear the Doctor calling her name from around the next corner. A crimson wire snags on her ankle strap and she concedes that maybe she should’ve stopped wearing heels out of the TARDIS after the fifteenth time they’d ended up being chased by guards within five minutes of landing, but ah well, you know what they say about hindsight and foresight and such.

“Clara!” cries the Doctor, sprinting back around the corner, “Clara, come on, what’re you lying on the floor for? We’ve got about two and a half minutes before this base turns into a giant Roman candle,” and as he mimes a ridiculous explosion with his hands and makes a _woosh_ noise with his huge eyes rolling up to the heavens she bites back a sharp report and resists the urge to slap him and gives a cerulean wire a sharp tug and –

 - and sees a figure pound down the corridor, huge bulky blaster in hand, lime green plasma arcing over her head and burning a small crater into the wall.

“Go,” she says, whirling round to stare at the Doctor, who is kneeling by her knees and sonicking alien wiring with an exasperated scowl on his face. He ignores her. She prods him in the chest with her left hand, hard. “Go! Get out of here, get back to the TARDIS, go, _go_!”

He glares at her, eyebrows rising in a way that is both warning and comic, but the rest of him is frustratingly _not moving_. A plasma blast hits the ceiling and ricochets into the air right above the Doctor’s right shoulder. Clara flips over on her knees, plants both hands in the Doctor’s chest and _shoves_.

“Seriously,” says Clara, voice so light and even she nearly freezes because she’s smart enough to know impending doom when she sees it and sane enough to be bloody terrified and she remembers when these things would have made her cry, “just go. I’ll be right behind you.”

The Doctor sighs, and Clara thinks she can hear her name in it, _Clara Clara_ , tender like disappointment in something she can’t quite see as he slips an arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees and pulls. Clara’s right shoe snaps in half and sparks fly from fraying wire-ends, gold against green, stinging her skin, and she can feel herself being lifted and denied and disbelieved.

“Clara Oswald,” says the Doctor, cradling her to his chest as he runs, “you’re going to have to learn – I’m the only one who gets to say bloody stupid things like that.”

Later, they will both look back at this moment and watch as everything changes.

***

**16.**

_“Doctor,” asks John, “why do you hate yourself?”_

_The Doctor frowns, then shrugs. John doesn’t look away. “I don’t,” says the Doctor, just a touch too defensive._

_John smiles, sad and sympathetic. He’d learned too quickly how to spot a lie._

_“You did.”_

***

_2._

“That,” says the Doctor, after, “was really spectacularly stupid of you. I know your species usually has about the same processing capability of a goldfish, but I would’ve thought you’d have something meatier in that gigantic head of yours.”

 “I’ve saved your life before,” says Clara, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “I intend to keep doing it. Do you have a problem with that, Doctor?”

“That’s not your job, Clara,” he says, oddly clipped, and turns away. “It’s mine.”

***

**15.**

_“I’ve been thinking,” he says, voice catching and accent thickening like a rising tide. “You keep saying, we don’t walk away.”_

_He takes a breath. Clears his throat. This is hard to say, and maybe it should be, maybe the sacrifice is the point._

_“There are people back on Earth who need me, Doctor,” he says, and feels the weight of dependability settling on his shoulders like a coat he’d forgotten how to wear. “I can’t keep walking away from that.”_

_The Doctor looks at him, and he sees something in that look, in those eyes. Disappointment, maybe. Resignation. Or maybe satisfaction, maybe hope._

_“I thought you’d say that,” says the Doctor, with a tiny, wondering chuckle. “I did, once.”_

_“I want to go home,” says John, after a moment. He does, he realizes. He does._

_The Doctor sighs. Smiles. There has to be some hurt in there, somewhere. “I thought you’d say that, too.”_

***

_3._

They have the oddest conversations over breakfast. There’s something about food, Clara discovers, that triggers some raw and chatty and memory-twined response in the Doctor, and she’s – well, she’s all too happy to exploit it.

(This does not, of course, make her a control freak or a manipulative game-player or any of those things, shut up.)

Over a plate of toast and beans, Clara asks the Doctor about his clothes and how he chooses them. He tugs defensively at the hem of his coat and mutters something about post-regeneration preference imprinting and how time lords never seemed to have fashions anyway and being easier for his friends to spot in crowds.

Over a pie of sorts made of bright orange berries from some alien marketplace somewhere, she asks him  about running and where he runs to and how he chooses his stars. He introduces her to the TARDIS’s randomizer, which looks like a big red button and also looks more terrifying than anything she’s ever seen before, except maybe the inside of a dalek, and then takes her on a tour of the bookshelves around the console room and tells her, somewhat sardonically, that he just reads a lot.

Over a bowl of rhubarb crumble and custard, Clara asks the Doctor about his friends and how he chooses them. He smiles and says something actually somewhat complimentary about her species and doesn’t use the term “pudding-brains” once, and it’s a lovely breakfast that leaves Clara warmed and full and with the niggling doubt that she’s been asking the wrong questions.

***

**14.**

_It is midnight on Mars and John is walking away._

_He can hear the Doctor coming after him, can hear the quiet shuffle of footsteps on the soft red dust. John keeps walking. He’s an old man, the Doctor knows that. The Doctor should know that he’s had time to learn how not to turn around._

_“John,” says the Doctor, with a hand on his shoulder and a soft coaxing voice from behind him, and for some reason that rankles a little. John huffs a laugh – the Doctor probably doesn’t even realize how much that voice sounds just like his English teacher._

_“John, come on, we need you back here,” the Doctor continues, thumb rubbing what are probably meant to be soothing circles round his shoulder blade. “You need to do this. You need to_ learn _this.”_

_“I don't need to learn anything,” snaps John, whirling round. The look on the Doctor’s face is shock, disappointment, enforced calm, and he really doesn’t care. “I don’t want to learn how to kill. I like myself just the way I am, Doctor, have you considered that?”_

_“It’s not – “ the Doctor tries, then sighs. They’re a pair of liars, the two of them, but they both have their limits. “Look, John, sometimes – sometimes there’s no good choices, alright? But someone still has to choose.”_

_“You be that someone, then,” John says, and shakes off the Doctor’s hand. “It’s not my job, remember?”_

_“I remember,” murmurs the Doctor, low, and when he waits the whole thing out in the TARDIS the Doctor comes back in smelling like soot and phantom blood and doesn’t say a word._

***

_4._

“You will kneel!” yells the leader of some kind of warrior clan, shaking his feathered staff in Clara’s face. His fingers ghost menacingly over a huge ceremonial rock or something, which happens to be the trigger button of yet another doomsday device, whoop de damn doo. Clara stands straighter and sticks her chin out.

“No,” she says, in her best English Teacher Voice, and brandishes the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver like a wand. “ _You_ will kneel.”

Later, chained to another set of posts in another inescapable dungeon with a rising tide lapping up around their ankles, the Doctor shoots her a look that is part-exasperated and part-irritated and whole-amused. “That’s – that’s not,” he says, with a sad attempt at a glare that slides obnoxiously into a smirk, “that is not how you do it.”

“Shut up,” snaps Clara, and kicks some water in his face.

***

**13.**

_“You’re alright,” says the Doctor, eyes frantic, hands smoothing over John’s chest. “Shut up, shut up, it’s fine, you’re alright.”_

_John coughs. “No,” he says, flatly, “I’m really not.”_

_“You will be,” whispers the Doctor, like a prayer._

***

_5._

The Doctor catches her as she keels over, lungs drained of oxygen, and destroys an entire empire in the time it takes for him to drag her, gasping and choking, into the TARDIS.

Later he holds her hair as she retches, dry, and rubs a pair of oddly gentle fingers along her spine.

“Are you alright?” he asks, voice soft and worried. Clara stops heaving long enough to shoot him an incredulous look.

“No,” she says, the most obvious thing in the world. The Doctor smiles.

***

**12.**

_“They were_ children _,” shouts John, rage building up in him so hot and red he can feel his tears heating on his cheeks. “And you killed them, you utter_ monster! _”_

_“I did,” says the villain-of-the-week, so smug and calm that John wants to surge forward and smack him across the face, plan be damned, “does it sadden you?” and for a moment John can’t speak, and he cannot tell if it is his anger or his tears that clog his throat so hard he feels like he’s choking._

_The Doctor takes down the whole operation with a flick of the sonic screwdriver and the judicious placement of a couple of explosives, in the end, but John walks back to the TARDIS with wet eyes and hands still shaking._

_“You’re still crying,” says the Doctor, gentle and surprised. “We saved that whole planet, and you’re still crying.”_

_“Of course I’m still crying,” snaps John, sorrow turning him sharp and jagged, “why aren’t you?”_

_The Doctor doesn’t answer, goes to get him a cup of water instead. John takes ragged breaths, hands over his face, until the lump in his throat subsides._

_“I used to,” says the Doctor, on returning. “I would have. But what would be the point?”_

_“Humanity,” John says, hard, and pretends he misses the brief flash of disgust-fear-regret in the Doctor’s eyes._

_He drinks his water._

***

_6._

The sun glints blue-white against the endless sprawling tundra, which glimmers and glistens like a giant diamond. The glaciers stretch out as far as the eye can see, and every now and then, a piece cracks off and splinters, spraying shards of broken ice like shattered glass and tiny droplets of water across the argent sky. This world is made of prisms that catch the sunlight and send little rainbows arcing across the sky and the ground and reflecting endlessly back and forth, colours dancing underfoot, and the sky is gilded with silver leaf and the sun glows with a light that looks like moonlight but infinitely stronger and brighter and more magical.

“Doctor,” says Clara, “is that a distress signal?”

The sun winks. The ice sparkles. The Doctor shoots her a look.

“Seriously? Is that the best you can do? ‘Is that a distress signal’,” the Doctor scowls, his best Scathing Voice of Mockery echoing off the ice in endless lilting spirals. “Whatever happened to all the hand-flapping and the huge eyes and the ‘oh my stars that's beautiful!’? Why do I even bother with the alien planets? We could just station ourselves in a police station in, in, in Cardiff. Cardiff! You'd like that, wouldn't you!” 

Clara eyes him like a particularly difficult four-year-old.  

“It's beautiful,” she says, slowly, “and there's a distress signal, right over there. Aren't you always the one lecturing me about priorities?”

He drops her elbow as they walk towards it. 

*** 

**11.**

_  
“Don’t do it,” says John, looking at the Doctor’s hand where it lies on the button. “You don’t have to. You could think of a better way.”_

_“Could I?” asks the Doctor, sounding lost and far away. “Could I really?”_

_“Yes!” John nearly yells, and oh, this is frustrating. “Look, this – this is_ a _solution, this is maybe even the hero’s solution, but you don’t have to be a hero. You get to be better than that.”_

_The Doctor looks up, meets John’s eyes. “You could be a doctor,” John whispers, and the Doctor’s hand comes off the button._

_“So could you, instead of the person who stops me,” says the Doctor, “I’m sorry.”_

_John looks up. The Doctor’s eyes are dark and disappointed, and John wishes he didn’t care._

_“You’re welcome,” says John, and the Doctor nods._

***

_7._

“How do you do it?” asks Clara, over a bowl of homemade porridge and honey, “how do you leave people behind and pretend it doesn't hurt?”

The Doctor blinks at her like a giant owl. For a moment he seems a bit lost. “Is this about Danny?”

Clara stabs her porridge with her spoon. 

“Danny,” she says, voice tight, “isn't here.”

The Doctor smiles, a bit dry, a bit strained. “That's how.”

***

**10.**

_“Right,” pants the Doctor, jogging up next to him, “you’re alright, right? Right. Let’s go,” and dashes off again, feet pounding down another endless corridor in what is quickly turning out to be a labyrinth of epically frustrating proportions._

_John pauses, hands braced on knees, breath coming in short puffs, and glares at the Doctor’s rapidly shrinking back._

_He wonders if the Doctor is running from an army or from his answer. He’s not sure he wants to find out._

***  
_8._

So Missy isn’t dead. Go figure.

“Miss me?” she chirrups, swinging her Umbrella of Insanity around in a wide arc as the ground beneath her shakes, actually _shakes_ , shivering with the force of some kind of drill that’s powering a nuclear weapon or maybe some kind of giant parasite that’s about to burrow out from under the ground to launch a conquest of the galaxy, Clara wasn’t really paying much attention.

“Not really,” says Clara, casting her eyes around for the Doctor, who’s probably in a wing somewhere disabling a vital computer system or attempting to hide from his greatest enemy/bane of his existence/love of his life, she honestly can’t even tell with these two anymore. “Our last date didn’t really leave the best impression.”

Missy pouts, and Clara thinks how oddly attractive her lips actually look in a moue and then bats the thought away with a mental flail of horrified disgust.

“In fact,” continues Clara, “the conversation was so dull I don’t think I even laughed once, and the rain went right through my favourite coat, I’m going to send you a bill for the dry cleaning.”

“You do that, dearie,” trills Missy, skipping around the highly advanced tech-y console in the centre of the room. “I might even pay! Who knows, I’m – “

“Bananas, I know,” says Clara, in a chirpy sort of deadpan. “So am I.”

She leans over the console, ignores all the highly advanced tech-y stuff and anything that looks like a lever or a keypad or an odd time-lordy squiggly bit, and slams her fist down on the giant red button in the centre.

The ground stops shaking. Missy’s frown deepens.

“Ah well, that’s Plan A shot. Trust the bloody English,” she sighs, fiddling with a cuff around her wrist that Clara hadn’t noticed before and can only assume is a teleport bracelet. “It _has_ been fun, Clara my gel. I’ll be seeing you!”

She vanishes in a puff of smoke. Approximately six milliseconds later, the Doctor comes jogging back into the room. Clara quirks an eyebrow at him.

“How – “ splutters the Doctor, ignoring her facial expression entirely, more’s the pity. “How did you - ?”

“Kept her talking, hit the self-destruct button, let her get away,” says Clara, ticking items off on her fingers. “It’s always a big red button, have you noticed? How hard would it be to make the button green?”

The Doctor is staring, with a squinty look that means he’s scrutinizing something particularly hard. In this case, that something would be _her_.

She’s gabbling, she realizes, and shuts her mouth quickly, but quite frankly she doesn’t think he’s really one to judge.

“You’re learning,” he says, finally, low.

Clara blinks. “I am,” she says, with some pride, and tries to ignore the troubled look he gives her.

After all, the base isn’t actually about to explode, to the best of her knowledge. Nothing to worry about.

***

**9.**

_“I’m not the one you wanted, am I,” John says, his long legs hanging out the open TARDIS doors. They’re floating over a supernova, and John supposes it’s meant to be something really special, only somewhere deep inside something registers it as a cheap trick, oft-repeated, the sort of thing the Doctor uses to impress the young and wide-eyed and soft._

_The light of a dying star catches on his silver hair, and John smiles ruefully and admits that it works on the old and hard and jaded, too._

_The Doctor sits on his left, in the shadow of the other door, and says nothing for a while. John reaches over, catches the Doctor’s hand in his, and something sparks in the Doctor’s eyes – stardust, or remembering._

_“You’re too much like me, I suppose,” says the Doctor, finally, faraway. The words drift and swirl into the black, just as ethereal and scintillating and unreal as the fire beneath their toes._

_John scoffs. “I am nothing like you.”_

_The Doctor turns, and smiles, and the spark is back again in the curl of the lips and the irony in the Doctor’s eyes. When the words come, they sound wrong but feel sincere._

_“You were.”_

***

_9._

“Are you alright?” asks the Doctor, voice rough with concern. “Telepathic aliens. Sorry. Not fun.”

Clara laughs, gulping back a few stray hysterical tears. “No,” she says, and tries a smile. Not too bad. “But I will be.”

The Doctor tries a smile too. He doesn’t do nearly as well, for some reason.

***

**8.**

_John stumbles out of his room at what probably counts as the wee hours on this impossible ship, and finds the Doctor in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea and deep eye bags and what looks like a raging headache._

_“Doctor?” says John, softly, coming closer, “Are you alright?”_

_He knows it’s a stupid question as soon as he asks it. Never ask a question you already know the answer to, especially if you know it’s going to be a lie. He could swear the hour’s made his brain turn into pudding._

_“I’m fine,” says the Doctor, and John doesn’t even have to look up to see the tired dry smile. He goes to the counter to make his own mug of tea instead, settles back down across the table. The Doctor’s pupils are not so much dilated as blown right open, and the skin around them is pale where it isn’t bruised with exhaustion. John sighs and wishes he had stronger tea._

_“Nightmares?” says John, not a question, and the Doctor stirs, smiles. Nearly makes it._

_“That obvious?” with a laugh, more embarrassed than amused. “I shouldn’t even be having them, really. They’re not fully mine. It’s quite annoying.”_

_John sips at his tea, casually as he can. He can feel his eyebrows rising, but then they’ve always had a mind of their own. “Dad skills,” he says, with a shrug, “I have an instinct for these things.”_

_The Doctor smiles. It’s a rare one that doesn’t spark, doesn’t smart. It’s warm, instead, a bit fond, nostalgic. Something shivers under John’s skin._

_“I knew someone like that once,” says the Doctor, “she loved children. Never could resist a crying child. Spent a year as an English teacher just because she could. I never quite found out what she was thinking.”_

_“What happened to her?” asks John, and is startled to find out that he actually is curious._

_The Doctor’s smile sharpens, twists slightly. “She went away. For the best, really, all things considered.”_

_“We must be like ghosts to you,” says John, wondering. In his hands, his tea grows cold. “Coming into your life, mucking about, going. You don’t even miss us.”_

_“You learn to let go, John,” the Doctor says, voice hard to cracking, “or you spend your life dreaming about all the ones you’ve lost.”_

_John looks down at his tea, not knowing what to say. He doesn’t even know why he’s angry. He’s not entirely sure if it matters._

_He should go. He would, if he could figure out how not to care. “I’ll take the nightmares, thanks,” he says, instead, and he would. He would._

_John can hear the scraping of a chair along the kitchen floor, the sound of a mug being placed on the table. He looks up. The Doctor’s smile is sad, but then again, when isn’t it?_

_“You remind me of her,” the Doctor says, and it sounds like warmth and longing, and it sounds like judgement, and maybe John can’t tell because the Doctor doesn’t know either._

_“Goodnight, John,” says the Doctor, and walks away._

***

_10._

Over a scoop of ice cream drizzled with crème anglaise, which incidentally is in direct violation of Clara’s possibly unnecessary diet, Clara asks the Doctor how it is he can just finish a battle and leave the fallout to handle itself.

He gapes at her for a second, spoon halfway to his mouth. “Honestly, Clara,” he says, sounding aghast, “does fallout seem like the kind of thing you’d trust me to handle?”

She takes another bite of her ice cream and has to admit that feeling is something she’s recently grown to understand.

Later, the Doctor asks her if she’d ever managed to make her perfect soufflé. The look he gives her when she says she’d actually stopped trying a while back is something she still doesn’t.

***

**7.**

_“Are you alright?” asks the Doctor, more assessing than concerned. John shoots a poisonous look from the floor._

_“Yeah, yeah, just peachy,” he says, not even bothering to hide the annoyance, “Got about a bucket of hallucinogens racing through my bloodstream but I’ve never felt better. Some Doctor Empathy you are.”_

_The Doctor smiles. John lets it assuage the guilt he feels for throwing up on the console._

***

_11._

She bolts the doors and presses the button on the panel by the airlock and pushes the Doctor in front of her and _runs_. The room behind them, the whole corridor, goes up in a ball of flame, roaring with a noise like a nightmare as the explosion rips off a wall and the whole lot gets sucked out into space, the screaming silence of the vacuum sucking at the bolted-shut doors.

She leans forward, palms flat on her knees, breathing deep. The Doctor, standing next to her and also, coincidentally, next to the station’s main command node, hits a few keys and plugs in some contraption or other and fixes the whole mess, and they leave what’s left of the crew safe if devastated and head back to the TARDIS in time for tea.

The Doctor doesn’t say a word the whole way.

“Okay,” says Clara, after the twelfth minute, “okay, clearly you are upset about something, so could you please explain what it is instead of sulking there like a child?”

“Those were people,” says the Doctor, spits, really, and Clara takes an involuntary step back. “That’s what you threw out the bleeding airlock in a ball of ruddy flame! Those were _people_.”

“They were infected!” Clara cries, exasperated, and thinks of the blank eyes, the gaping mouths, the unreasoning desire to destroy, and wonders when it was that the Doctor lost what seemed to be left of his mind. “There was no cure, they were about to kill us, and without us the rest of the crew was good as dead! You would’ve made that decision except you were too busy preventing one of them from ripping your throat out, so I did it for you!”

The Doctor turns away, and Clara wonders, angrily, how he could feel he has any right to be disgusted. “That’s not your job,” he says, not looking at her. “Your job is to _care_.”

“Right,” she spits back, and she isn’t sorry, she _isn’t_ , “so you don’t have to.”

A beat of silence. Stalemate. Clara sighs, deep in her gut, and bites her lip.

“Do you have any idea,” she starts, and hates how her throat closes, how she sounds like she’s crying. She’s never been ashamed of crying before. She figures it’s never too late to start. “what it would feel like, to just stand there and let you get your stupid self killed? I couldn’t do it,” and here, _there_ , she’s crying now, actual tears, so obviously she _cares_ , and he can just _shut it_ , “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live without you.”

“No,” he says, after a moment, “you couldn’t live without the Doctor,” and then he must realize that he’s crossed some kind of line because he doesn’t try to explain himself and doesn’t say it again when Clara looks at him like she hadn’t heard.

***

**6.**

_“Doctor,” says John, one day, “why am I here?”_

_The Doctor looks up from under the console. The floor around it has been ripped up, wires scattered everywhere, and the Doctor’s frankly rather small frame seems to have vanished under the mess. This, apparently, is the Doctor’s version of fixing things. John wonders what that means for their relationship._

_“Because you agreed to come, I suppose,” says the Doctor, lightly, and goes back to fiddling with a wire. It sparks noisily. “Not regretting it, are you?”_

_“No,” John says, a bit too quickly. “And that’s not what I meant. What do you want me here for, Doctor? What, exactly, is my job?”_

_The Doctor frowns, doesn’t meet John’s eyes. “I can’t tell you that, John,” says the Doctor, discarding the little bit of wire, “it wouldn’t be fair.”_

_John sits down on the floor, legs dangling through the hole. Beneath his feet the Doctor is fiddling with pieces of intricate machinery he has a feeling neither of them understand in the slightest, and he is starting to have doubts about what, exactly, the Doctor is trying to fix. He wishes he knew how to help, wishes so hard it hurts._

_“I’m a caretaker,” he says, with a small shrug, “My job is to take care, I suppose.”_

_The Doctor nods, flashes him one of those brilliant multi-faceted broken-glass smiles, still does not look up. “Someone has to.”_

***

_12._

The Doctor gets a message from someone named Martha Jones, and Clara is struck by the sudden realization that she isn’t the only person who’s got the TARDIS on call. She is not, she decides immediately, going to make a big deal out of this, because she isn’t that sort of clingy or needy, but still.

Martha Jones is about five years older than Clara and shows it, carries herself with a straightness to her spine and a wickedly clever dignity to her features. She has a medical degree and a military bearing, cocoa skin and dark wavy hair that looks like it’d recently been released from ill-considered cornrows, and her face splits with a brilliant grin when the TARDIS materializes on her lawn.

“Doctor Jones!” cries the Doctor, stepping out of the TARDIS with the biggest smile on his face, and Clara bites back several sharp sentences of jealousy, feeling like an absolute cow.

Martha raises an eyebrow, then both eyebrows, then her entire face falls into an expression of shock. “Doctor!” she says, eyes wide as saucers, “you’ve, wow, you’ve. You’ve changed.”

The Doctor stops short, taking a step back and attempting to lean casually against the big blue doors. “Yeah,” he says, fumbling slightly awkwardly, “so I have.”

“Hey, no judgement here,” says Martha, smile broadening again. “So have I.”

She takes two steps forward, two broad, brave steps, eager and unafraid, and catches the Doctor up in a hug.

“I’ve missed you,” Martha says, and the Doctor’s hands settle, almost involuntarily, across her strong shoulders.

Clara watches them from the TARDIS threshold, feeling small and inadequate and a bit lost. She’s the girl who’s always been there, who put herself so far into the Doctor that every inch of his life is tied up in some part of her, but there are still people he used to be that she’s never known and even when he’s become someone else entirely there are still parts of him she cannot touch.

She wonders if anyone could say the same about her.

***

**5.**

_“What were you thinking?” the Doctor demands, arms crossed and eyes livid. There is something hard about the Doctor’s eyes, a sheet of glass ready to hold or shatter, a sliver of ice John’s always suspected was there but never had the guts to look for. It looks like anger. It might, John thinks, be fear._

_“We could have saved them,” says John, because he feels like someone has to. “We could have given them a second chance.”_

_“Not everyone would take one,” says the Doctor, eyes closing. “Not everyone can be trusted, John.”_

_“I know,” says John, “I know.”_

***

_13._

She makes another soufflé, the first in a year, and it flattens in the oven but she can’t bring herself to care.

“Doctor,” she says, between bites, “what’s it like, to change like that?”

He looks up at her, eyes wide like an angry owl, blinks hard. He doesn’t answer.

“It’s just, the way Martha was looking at you,” she says, and chokes down another bit of soufflé. It’s not so bad, really. “It’s like she could see that – the Doctor, I guess. Her Doctor. I just – what’s it _like_?”

It’s not the most eloquent she’s ever been. A small traitorous part of her hopes he won’t understand the question.

“You do too,” says the Doctor, sounding carefully unconcerned. He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Sometimes. Don’t think I can’t tell, Clara Oswald. I’m not as stupid as you seem to think everyone is if they’re not you.”

That stings. It does. Clara wishes she didn’t know why.

“So do you,” she shoots back, looking up. She can feel herself tearing up, shit. “Stop being such a hypocrite, Doctor. _You_ spent the longest time looking at me and seeing _two dead girls_ , and it’s not like I don’t see how sometimes you stare like you’re wishing I’d go back to being twenty-four and naive again. You used to look at me and not see me and now I’ve become someone you _have_ to see I’m starting to think you miss it!”

The Doctor finishes his soufflé. His fork clinks against his plate and Clara wishes she could, wishes she could just take off or go home and leave him behind and she hates that she’s addicted to this life so hard she’ll actually sit here waiting for his answer.

“I used to look at you,” he says, finally, “and not see _me_. And _yes_ , I did like you better that way.”

He stands up and dumps his plate in the sink and leaves before her first tear can even fall, damn him.

***

**4.**

_“Your family,” says the Doctor, gentle and casual and probing, probably, searching for something neither of them can name, “do you miss them?”_

_“What are you talking about, of course I do,” snaps John, a bit hasty, a bit defensive, a bit unsure. The truth is his family’s gone hazy around the edges, like a story told to make him feel like he belonged in someone else’s life. It worries him, who he is, who he might become. “Do you miss yours?”_

_“Yeah, yeah, ‘course,” says the Doctor, in exactly the same way. There’s no fear in the Doctor’s eyes, though, no horror at the forgetting, and in that moment John blinks hard and promises himself_ no.

***

_14._

“I’m sorry,” he says, without preamble. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” says Clara, and smiles, and shrugs, and even means it. “Fine. I’m always fine.”

The Doctor nods, once, and takes a step away. Clara watches him go.

“Doctor,” she calls, and he pauses. “I’m learning,” she says, and smiles.

He turns to look at her. For once he looks her in the eye.

“You are,” he says, and doesn’t.

***

**3.**

_“John!” the Doctor shouts, and John ducks and rolls on blind instinct and blinder adrenaline, watches as a beam of yellowish light explodes against a wall over his left shoulder. The Doctor grabs his hand and yanks him off the floor, already running for the TARDIS at full pelt. John swears and follows._

_“Is it always like this?” asks John, later, rubbing at his bruised arm. “Because I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Doctor, but I’m not exactly a spring chicken.”_

_The Doctor looks up from the console, just briefly. John thinks he sees the hint of a smile. It’s almost smaller than the sliver of worry dancing at its tips._

_“You’re fine,” says the Doctor, reassuring. “You’re fine. You’re fine.”_

***

_15._

She opens the doors and sees London.

“Alright,” she says, taking a step back, “grocery run, then, I suppose. Are we out of milk?”

The console room is silent. Well, it’s not exactly _silent,_ with the humming of the walls and the clicking of gears in the console and the soft _woosh_ the time rotor makes as it settles, but there is no snapping of levers into landing positions, no clatter of dress shoes on the grating. No harsh Scottish voice calling from the other end of the room.

“Doctor?” calls Clara, and feels her heart stutter, fear like a double heartbeat.

Then: footfalls in nearby corridors, a soft lilting whistle, getting closer. As always, he comes when she calls for him. Her Doctor.

Her Doctor who comes up behind her, holding a suspiciously familiar suitcase in one hand. Her Doctor who smiles at her, hard and infinitely sad.

“No,” says her Doctor, sliding a suitcase into Clara’s hands, “we’re not.”

Clara feels the second her heart stops.

“No,” she says, whirling around, pushing in, pushing _back_. The console room swims in front of her, a mass of smoky colours and flashing lights and horror and _home_ , and she dives into it, smashing her small dizzy weight against the Doctor’s chest. “No. No, no, _no_ you are not doing this to me, not again, no you are _not_.”

“Clara,” says the Doctor, slipping his fingers between hers and holding her thrashing arms in place, and for a breathtaking moment she hates him so much her eyes burn.

“Clara,” he breathes, sliding an arm around her shoulders, “calm down. Please.”

Clara Oswald is no good at taking orders, but. She will have no power over this situation if she is hysterical. She takes a deep breath, and takes a step back, just an inch toward the looming doorway. She pulls her hands from his and doesn’t know if she was hoping he would pull back.

“You promised me,” says Clara, voice barely trembling, “that you wouldn’t send me away again.”

“I am not sending you _away_ ,” says the Doctor, and she can hear the lie in his mouth, hear how it sours against his tongue, “I am sending you _home_. “

Clara says nothing. The Doctor sighs, and his look turns plaintive, like he’s begging her to forgive him, if ever the Doctor begged.

“We all have to go home sometime, Clara,” he says, and he looks even more tired than she feels.

She looks at him, and thinks about heroes, and about lovers, about the stars and about her students and all the people who need her in this city, and about the person she was when she never could run away from them. _It’s a time machine_ , she hears someone say, _you can run away all you want…_

It isn’t fair, she thinks, irrationally, it isn’t fair that he can teach her how to run and stand there and tell her when to stop.

“This is not my home,” she says, “I have nothing to go back to.”

The Doctor sighs. He places the suitcase down on the floor, by the door, like a little doorstop. “You walk this earth, Clara,” he says, “you breathe this air. You breathed it for twenty-four years before you met me. You don’t get to throw that away now.”

“You’ve been breathing it longer than I have,” snaps Clara, “it’s no more my home than it is yours.”

If he could have, Clara knows, he would already have disagreed.

In this moment she realizes that neither of them will win this fight.

“Clara,” says the Doctor, and he takes a step forward and holds her to him and she can feel wetness seeping into her back and for a moment it stops her, the shock of it, she has always been the one who cries. “Clara, my Clara. Just – please. Stop being so stubborn and let me save you.”

“Save me from what?” she murmurs into his chest, and oh, she wishes so much that she could hate him.

“I can’t – me, Clara. Me,” and he sucks in a breath, breathes it out over the top of her head. “I can’t stand here and watch you turn into me.”

He holds her. She lets him. Outside, the city goes by, the sounds of the street as alien to her as a dome-capped citadel has ever been to him.

Clara takes a step back, looks the Doctor clear in the eye.

“Then don’t,” she says, and snaps the doors closed.

***

**2.**

_“Something awesome,” he says, whistling through his teeth. “Well, you really weren’t lying about that, were you?”_

_He hears a sharp, affronted gasp somewhere to his right. “I,” says the Doctor, imperiously, with a smile that is tired and wry and still somehow dimpled, “never lie.”_

_John laughs._

_They stand and watch as the sun before them expands, sending tendrils of rust-golden light curling over the metal-tipped pyramid three asteroids away. The top of the pyramid winks like a burning coal. In the slowly-dawning dark, the silence grows and swells into something spiced and sacred._

_“Have you been here before?” asks John, soft and breathless. This place, he thinks, this place is leaching the roughness and the anger and the wrinkles from his voice. He wonders, with a sort of bewildered awe, how it is that anyone could grow old out here, among these stars. How it could ever make you tired._

_The Doctor pauses, takes a breath that seems to hover over all the things that are not being said._

_“Once,” says the Doctor, “a long time ago. I was a different person, then.”_

_A wind blows in from the horizon. It tangles golden with the silver hair on John’s cheek. “Did it make you young?”_

_The Doctor laughs, soft and breathless, and for a moment John can see the whisper of a wonder that must have shone so brightly, once._

_“Oh, John,” says the Doctor, “I was so young already.”_

_They stand in silence as the sun rises over Akhaten._

***

_16._

Over a cup of tea and finality, Clara asks the Doctor the question she’d really meant, all along.

“Doctor,” she asks, and watches as his smile grows and his eyes sparkle and his hands begin to shake, “why do you hate yourself so much?”

“For every reason you don’t,” he says, “Clara Oswald.”

***

**1.**

_John walks into his office on an absolutely dismal Monday and finds it’s been colonized by a girl in a black jacket and a box in a frankly astonishing shade of blue. He hasn’t had enough coffee yet to give both of them a proper glare, so he settles for an annoyed look and lets his eyebrows finish the job._

_“What,” he says, poking at the box with his broom, “is that thing, and what is it doing in my office?”_

_“Something awesome,” says the girl, with a small smirk. Her cheeks dimple adorably. “And for now, it’s just sitting. But if you’ll come inside, well. It could change your life, this old thing. It did me.”_

_John looks at the box. It looks oddly familiar, striking a tender place in his memory, and he thinks of stars and ships and – no, and streets, and streetlamps, and call boxes on street corners. Boyhood in the 1960s, that’s what it must remind him of. The blue of the doors makes him feel very old, all of a sudden._

_“Mister John Smith,” says the girl with the dimples, reaching out a hand to shake. There’s something in her eyes, just a shadow of a shadow. “You’re the caretaker here, aren’t you?”_

_“Yeah,” says John, shortly. He puts his broom down. “And who are you?”_

_The girl smiles, and her face changes so entirely, shifting into warm and then masterful and then sharp and full of wonder, into a beautiful mess of contradictions, that for a moment John can look into her brightening eyes and see everything. The stars, the spark, the shadow._

_“I’m Clara Oswald,” says the girl, and snaps her fingers, “but nowadays people just call me the Doctor.”_

_The doors swing open._

***

_17._

“I don’t walk away,” says the Doctor, before, and Clara smiles at the familiarity. Neither thing is new, not the creed, not the lie.

“I know,” she says, and kisses him on the forehead. She has to tiptoe – he’s bigger than her, she doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t _bigger_ than her, but. Now, it seems, she doesn’t have far to reach.

After, she strips him of his coat, slips it on. The weight in the pockets moors her; the red silk lining whispers secrets against her skin. It trails down to her thighs, like a cloak, like a mantle.

“Neither do I,” says Clara, and opens the watch.


End file.
